Wednesday, December 12, 2012

School Lunches

A conversation with some
guys at work recently got me thinking about the good ole days of school lunches.You were either a “Bringer” or a “Buyer”.Some Bringers actually got to buy milk at
school to eat with their lunches but that didn’t change their status to a
Buyer.After all, it was only milk.

Bringers were a
sub-culture all our own.I was a
Bringer.It was cheaper than buying even
the subsidized school lunches, and often fresher and of better quality.I must have consumed 3,000 sandwiches brought
from home during my pre-collegiate years.My regular was ham with either Swiss or American cheese and mayo on
white bread.My second most common lunch
was probably tuna.Nothing fancy.No relish or onion or celery bits chopped
into the tuna.It was just tuna and
mayo.As I think of it know, between the
tuna and the ham sandwiches, I must have consumed a jar of mayo a month.Kinda gross as I think of it now but it was just
the way it was.

Even though we had the
fresher lunch, us Bringers always coveted the life of the Buyer.The Buyer typically carried cash money to
school everyday, stood in that line that disappeared into the kitchen in the
school cafeteria, and then later emerged at the cashier.Us Bringers never got to go and see the
inside of that kitchen.It was a private
club for members only.If you were a
Bringer, you never got to handle money.Never got to stand in that line.And never got an exclusive invite into the kitchen.We were outcasts.Second class citizens.

I would relish the days
when my Mom forgot to run to the supermarket to replenish the ham or tuna and
she would let me, for an exclusive, limited engagement only, become a Buyer for
the day.I felt special.I always remember thinking about what I would
buy for lunch.When I’d get to school on
those oh so special days, I would check the school lunch calendar that always
hung in our classroom.What would the “hot
lunch” be for today?Turkey
Tetrazini?Pasta with tomato sauce?Roasted chicken?Lasagna?The hot lunch always came with either a vegetable or a piece of fruit,
some sort of dessert, and a container of milk.If you got the hot lunch, you were sitting pretty.The envy of Bringers everywhere.

If the hot lunch for that
day was something I didn’t like, I’d venture out and try some of the other specialties
of the house.There were usually things
like chicken fingers or chili.Or the
ever-reliable square chunk of pizza.In
retrospect, that pizza was more like a big slab of bread that had been swabbed
with sauce and sprinkled with a few shredded morsels of mozzarella cheese and then
baked in the oven until it resembled a brick.Typically I’d get a slice that was all black and charred on the bottom
and rock hard on top.I would scrape the
charred bottom of any cheese and sauce with my teeth and then toss the
rest.Occasionally (or should I say “rarely”),
I’d get a piece that was undercooked.The bread was soft and mushy, the sauce a little cold and the cheese
barely melted.Any you know what?It was awesome!!All I needed was to get one of those soft,
mushy slices every once in a while and it kept me coming back.

Of course, whether you
were a Bringer or a Buyer, everyone shared in the universal pastime of “trading.”The cafeteria had its own economy, and every
food item was currency.

“Trade you a half of a
sandwich for a brownie?”

“What kind of sandwich?”

“Tuna on white bread.”

“No way, not for my
brownie.”

Brownies were like
trading gold bouillon.Like diamonds
straight off the boat from South Africa.There was pretty much nothing you couldn’t buy if you had a
brownie.You were at the top of the food
chain – literally.

Now if you had an
apple?Good luck unloading that.Who wants that?An apple was a fruit which was pretty much as
close as you could come to a vegetable without actually having one.Sad to think how many apples I ended up
tossing in the trash because I didn’t want it and couldn’t get anything good
for it on the lunchroom trading floor.

Shockingly, I do remember
this one time where I was able to trade an apple for a half of a sandwich.I must be kidding, right?Or I’m not remembering it correctly.Maybe it was a caramel apple?Yeah, that must’ve been it.

Nope.I had traded with a kid who was new to the
school and hadn’t yet learned the value of certain items on the cafeteria stock
exchange.At the time, the kid seemed
very happy with his(my) apple.And I was
thrilled to have scored an extra half of a sandwich.I guess I shouldn’t have taken advantage of
the new kid.And in truth, I felt a
little bad about it.But only for a
little while.

1 comment:

I enjoyed this post--it really took me back! My memories of those days seems a bit hazy, but to the best of my recollection, I was a hybrid creature. My mom packed a lot of lunches, but we must have looked ahead at the schedule, because sometimes I bought my lunch. Usually on pizza days, ham sandwich days, pasta days. And I know exactly the pizza you're talking about: there were the "real" pizzas that were a little rectangle with some kind of thin, floppy crust-like flour product, and then there were the "French bread pizzas," which were the stale, leftover hoagie buns slathered in sauce, cheese, and maybe pepperoni, then overcooked to oblivion. I hated those.

The most common lunch I can remember being packed was a peanut butter and honey sandwich, pudding (in a metal can!), Hi-C drink, and I'm sure there was more to it. Probably apple sauce. Probably a homemade dessert, too.